25 SEPTEMBER 1964, Page 16

fencing or waste ground, urban or industrial object, is transmuted

with her peculiar gravity and at times a surprising grandeur—no. matter on how small a scale she works. It is significant that the artist, who was born in 1919, spent most of the last war as a mapping and engin- eering draughtsman. Evidently it gave her a feel- ing for the flat patterning of the painted surface and expressively contoured shape or gadget which has informed her pictorial handwriting ever since.

But Prunella Clough is also the most painterly and subtlest of colourists. Never appealing simply to charm, she can win assent to an almost brutal intrusion of a hard squarish mass, or staccato device suggesting a traffic sign, into her softer areas of heart-easing hues. Consider her largest painting, divided down the centre something like a double bill. An evocative medley of colour shapes floats on the two fields of cream and inky blue. One tunes-in with the clue of District Line. Presently one hat the impression of looking abstractedly at Underground posters merged with adjacent signs, until it all takes on the spacious feel of countryside, some indeterminate land- scape at the journey's end. Nor is this idle make- believe, as when we look instinctively for 'faces in the fire' in the unpremeditated gestures of action painting. Our reverie is really set in train by some scrap intensely seen in Hanger Lane, or Fulham, or the Met, from which this artist's image, her visual metaphor, has slowly and im- aginatively germinated. The varied handling assists each idea. Thinly washed or densely curdled, the touch is again downy as a feather duster to capture the flicker of a garden hedge, or gather into gritty congeries to make a piece of waste ground palpable to our every sense.

A distinguished predecessor of mine, Michael Middleton, has wittily differentiated abstracts by their edible quality. Some brittle ones, if you tried to eat them, would splinter and cut your mouth. Others would dissolve quickly and sweetly like so much candy floss. Prunella aough's, he has observed, have a tougher, chewy consistency. This is true still of some most satis- fying paintings, though the tendency is rather, towards lightness and spareness. In a few col- lages of recent months she indicates her present dilemma. Here something of the 'pop' feeling for immediacy accompanies the skimpiest sigti- writing which seems foreign to her contemplat- ive nature. If her art were to lose touch with life, as might appear in a trifle of a few plastic arcs and a needly line, she must lose her identity and her way. Consistency of vision is to this gifted artist her very life=line.

NEVILE WALLAS